Vera Cruz Jasper A Key To Early Trade

Buried beneath twigs and leaves in a park in the village of Vera Cruz is a type of rock that was as important to prehistoric people as plastic is to modern man. It's called jasper.

From the earliest epics of human population in Pennsylvania -- some 10,000 years ago -- until Europeans came in contact with Native Americans around 1600 A.D., the stone was chipped and shaped into knives, spear points, arrow tips and other tools.

Today, most people don't have much use for jasper, other than as a piece of jewelry. The exception is James Hatch, associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State He has conducted extensive research into jasper, its origins and use.

Hatch will discuss his latest research, which was funded by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, during a daylong workshop on archaeology today at the State Museum.

Most recently, his studies have rebutted a long-held assumption in the archaeological community that most of the jasper artifacts found as far away as New England originated in eastern Pennsylvania -- particularly in the geological area within a 200-mile radius of Allentown.

It was thought that Native Americans either traveled to New England with jasper tools in hand or traded them to Indians in New Jersey or other areas, where their use spread.

"At this point, from our initial results, it appears that none of the New England artifacts that were submitted to us for analysis match the chemical profiles of jasper outcrops from Lehigh, Bucks or Berks counties as we had thought they might," Hatch said.

His research did show, however, that jasper from the three counties was traded into New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia and western Pennsylvania.

The result is that researchers now know that prehistoric trade networks were extensive but not as extensive as originally thought.

"It begins to define regions of use and regions of trade that were unknown before," said Stephen Warfel, senior curator of archaeology at the Pennsylvania State Museum in Harrisburg.

Hatch and others believe that the largest surviving public jasper quarry in Pennsylvania is in Vera Cruz in a park named, appropriately, Jasper Park.

There, people can walk on trails through a 3-acre wooded area where quarry pits as deep as 10 feet remain as testament to the ancient ways of the Native Americans.